Archive for November, 2009
How To Use Funny Humor In Business For Profit: Powerful Marketing Tool
Posted by admin in Funny Humor on November 27, 2009
Have you been told that you have a good sense of humor throughout your life? Do you find that things are easier to understand when they are described in a humorous way? Humor helps us appreciate the good times and smile through the bad times. Humor is a good memory tool. It is part of who we are as humans.
Perhaps you enjoy a good joke every now and then, or you find yourself seeing the funny side of things. Did you ever think that you could use humor to make money? Many people use humor as a marketing tool to make money, and not just stand-up comedians and television writers.
If you are an exceptional observer and commentator, if you spend time analyzing jokes and why they are funny, if you want to spend many years working hard to make it, then you very well may have what it takes to be a successful stand-up comedian.
For most of us, however, getting on stage and speaking in front of people is not something we want to do. Some people are terrified of speaking in front of a group; it’s the number one phobia world-wide.
There are many other ways to make a good living using humor. Try to think of commercials that are particularly effective. Chances are the commercials you thought about were funny. This is because a good joke is memorable. Advertisers have understood this for decades.
Behind every great funny commercial, there is an ad writer. The ability to find the funny side of things is a hot commodity in the advertising business. Talented ad writers make a good living. Even in political campaigns, humor is used to make a point, or get folks to pay attention to a person or issue.
Humor is one of the most powerful forms of persuasion. For centuries, humor has been an effective way to sway people’s emotions or opinions. If you have a good sense of humor, you could even be a public relations representative for a firm or celebrity.
The ability to make people laugh helps them to see you or your company as approachable and friendly. This is why humor is such a powerful tool to persuade people. It’s also why most speeches begin with a funny anecdote or joke. It “warms up” the audience.
Every year, funny books, stories, and memoirs reach the top of the bestseller lists. This is another way to make money with your sense of humor. Some of the most famous and popular columns in national newspapers are based on humorous observations of everyday life.
Do you run some kind of business? Try using a little humor in your marketing plan with your print, television, and online advertisements. Do not be so “professional” that you never smile at your customers. Chances are that you have a competitor in your area. Give your customers a unique and pleasant experience and you’ll have the edge on your competition.
Humor unites people. Humor persuades. It helps us through tough situations. It makes pleasant situations more enjoyable. For these reasons, and many others, humor will never go out of style and will always be in demand. Why not capitalize on this demand and make a little extra profit by making people laugh?
Humor as a Stress Reducer and Energizer
Posted by admin in Office Humor on November 20, 2009
Work is often associated with stress, and we know that stress is one of the main causes of illness, absenteeism, and burnout. Humor is a great stress reliever because it makes us feel good, and we can’t feel good and feel stress simultaneously. At the moment we experience humor, feelings like depression, anger, and anxiety dissolve.
Humor and, its partner, laughter also reduce stress by activating the physiological systems including the muscular, respiratory, cardiovascular, and skeletal. In fact, we may even lose muscle control, as many of us have, when we laugh so hard that we fall down or wet our pants. Laughter has been labeled a jogging and juggling of the internal organs. When we laugh we feel physically better, and after laughter we feel lighter and more relaxed.
In addition, humor provides a psychological stress reducer as it snaps our thinking to another channel. Norman Cousins called it trainwrecks of the mind. One of the characteristics of humor is that it involves incongruity. We find things humorous when they are incongruous or mismatched. Good jokes guide us down one path only to suddenly track us onto another. The tracking is what we call the punch line. As we are tracked over, our thinking shifts and, in fact, breaking the mind set of the thinking leads to increased creativity.
Consider the story of the midwestern farmer crossing Harvard square searching for the library. He approaches a stately looking gentleman, who happens to be a Harvard English professor, and he asks, “Excuse me sir. Can you tell me where the library is at?” The professor looks somewhat disdainfully and replies, “At Harvard we do not end sentences with prepositions.” After a pause the farmer turns back to the professor and asks, “Well then, can you tell me where the library is at…Asshole.” In this joke we are guided down one path and suddenly tracked over to another. The incongruity is what we experience as humorous.
We know that all good lecturers have many jokes, stories, and anecdotes that are shared in order to command attention and energize the audience. Humor wakes us up and increases our attending. An office bulletin board loaded with cartoons, one liners, jokes, pictures, etc. is one way to invite humor into the workplace. A few moments of humor at work can lead to increased productivity as the newly energized employee returns to his or her task.
If you are having a bad day and would like to brighten it up, all you might have to do is to read a joke a funny story. There are plenty of resources on the web, including humor blogs, Digg-Humor, Funny-Or-Die and Fun’N’Love.
Humor is a major career asset, so let’s be serious about humor and use humor to lighten our seriousness in the workplace. As we increase our personal humor quotient and spread our humor contagiously to others, we will begin to see the “lite” at the end of the tunnel.
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